Music of the Spheres Redux

>Black Holes Sing Bass, But Humans Can't Hear Them
>Sept. 9, 2003
>
>By Deborah Zabarenko
>
>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Big black holes sing bass.
>
>One particularly monstrous black hole has probably been humming B
>flat for billions of years, but at a pitch no human could hear, let
>alone sing, astronomers said on Tuesday.
>
>"The intensity of the sound is comparable to human speech," said
>Andrew Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, England.
>But the pitch of the sound is about 57 octaves below middle C,
>roughly the middle of a standard piano keyboard.
>
>This is far, far deeper than humans can hear, the researchers said,
>and they believe it is the deepest note ever detected in the
>universe.
>
>The sound is emanating from the Perseus Cluster, a giant clump of
>galaxies some 250 million light-years from Earth. A light-year is
>about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.
>
>Fabian and his colleagues used NASA's orbiting Chandra X-Ray
>Observatory to investigate X-rays coming from the cluster's heart.
>Researchers presumed that a supermassive black hole, with perhaps
>2.5 billion times the mass of our sun, lay there, and the activity
>around the center bolstered this assumption.
>
>Black holes are powerful matter-sucking drains in space, and
>astronomers believe most galaxies, including our own Milky Way, may
>contain black holes at their centers. Black holes have not been
>directly observed, because their gravitational pull is so strong
>that nothing, not even light, can escape it.
>
>SOUND WAVES
>
>So researchers have concentrated on what happens around the edges of
>black holes, just before matter is pulled in. When scientists
>trained the Chandra observatory on the center of Perseus last year,
>they saw concentric ripples in the cosmic gas that fills the space
>between the galaxies in the cluster.
>
>"We're dealing with enormous scales here," Fabian said in a
>telephone interview. "The size of these ripples is 30,000
>light-years."
>
>Fabian said the ripples were caused by the rhythmic squeezing and
>heating of the cosmic gas by the intense gravitational pressure of
>the jumble of galaxies packed together in the cluster. As the black
>hole pulls material in, he said, it also creates jets of material
>shooting out above and below it, and it is these powerful jets that
>create the pressure that creates the sound waves.
>
>To scientists, he said, pressure ripples equate to sound waves. By
>calculating how far apart the ripples were, and how fast sound might
>travel there, the team of researchers determined the musical note of
>the sound.
>
>Fabian said the notion of singing black holes might well be
>extrapolated to other galaxies, but not necessarily to the Milky Way.
>
>Chandra has looked at X-ray emissions from the Milky Way's center,
>and astronomers believe there is a black hole there, but because it
>is a young, rambunctious galaxy with lots of activity at its heart,
>this may interfere with any note our black hole might sing, Fabian
>said.

recommended CD:

Dr. Fiorella Terenzi (radio-astronomer/music composer):
_Music from the Galaxies_ [Island Records]

The Cosmos plays enigmatically numinous microtonal music - "the sound is
very complex and is not uniform.... Some parts seem to be well tuned around
B-flat or D-minor [in a complex, fluctuating drone "loop"].... The predominant
microtonality of the galaxy is a fascinating aspect that could be explored
during research by creating new scales and timbres. The galaxy itself can be used
as a musical instrument if it is broken into fragments..." (Dr. Fiorella
Terenzi, from liner notes to the above-mentioned CD).

--- º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º º°`°º ø,¸~->

Hanuman Zhang, musical mad scientist
(no, I don't wanna take over the world, just the sound spectrum...)
http://www.boheme-magazine.net

"What strange risk of hearing can bring sound to music - a hearing whose
obligation awakens a sensibility so new that it is forever a unique, new-born,
anti-death surprise, created now and now and now. .. a hearing whose moment
in time is always daybreak." - Lucia Dlugoszewski

"... simple, chaotic, anarchic and menacing.... This is what people of today
have lost and need most-- the ability to experience permanent bodily and
mental ecstasy, to be a receiving station for messages howling by on the ether from
other worlds and nonhuman entities, those peculiar short-wave messages which
come in static-free in the secret pleasure center in the brain." - Slava Ranko
(Donald L. Philippi)

"There's a rabbinical tradition that the music in heaven will be microtonal"
-annotative interpretation of Schottenstein Tehillim, 92:4, the verse being:
"Upon a ten-stringed * instrument and upon lyre, with singing accompanied by
harp." [* utilizing new tones]

NADA BRAHMA - Sanskrit, "sound [is the] Godhead"

"God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of himself." -Thomas
Merton

LILA - Sanskrit, "divine play/sport/whimsy" - "the universe is what happens
when God wants to play" - "joyous exercise of spontaneity involved in the art
of creation"